On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 6:53 AM, Stefan Seefeld via Boost-build <boost-build@lists.boost.org> wrote:
On 31.03.2017 13:35, Steven Watanabe via Boost-build wrote:
> AMDG
>
> On 03/31/2017 11:14 AM, Stefan Seefeld via Boost-build wrote:
>> Ah, interesting ! So this provides a mechanism to capture a target's
>> result while still letting if fail. But it seems this comes at a price:
>> To be able to capture results of individual target builds, I need to
>> submit them individually (via "UPDATE_NOW"), which precludes
>> parallelization.
>> If I submit multiple targets at once, I only get the overall success
>> back. Correct ?
>   Yep.  As a workaround, you can batch them, and
> then call UPDATE_NOW again individually to get
> the results.  UPDATE_NOW never tries to build
> any target more than once, no matter how many times
> it is called from the same b2 process.

I'm actually wondering whether that's (necessary) true: Is the bjam
engine thread-safe ? If I run `b2 -j 8`, may I invoke UPDATE_NOW from
one action and expect other targets to continue to be built in parallel
? Would that break ? Or would that serialize the execution ?

None of the above. Yes, the engine is parallel-safe. But that is irrelevant for this question. All targets are built with the same mechanism at the low level. The differences for UPDATE_NOW are when it executes the actions and how it waits for them. Regular action execution happens after the parsing/evaluation of the b2 files during the make stages. UPDATE_NOW happens during the parsing/evaluation and blocks it until the actions complete. So there's no question about thread safety, or parallel safety, since b2 is single threaded anyway.

--
-- Rene Rivera
-- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything
-- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net
-- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail